• “There won’t be a war, but the struggle for peace will be so intense that not a stone will be left standing.”

    The official Soviet slogan was “the struggle for peace.” In Russian, it carried a deliberate ambiguity – both a promise to preserve peace and an assertion of global control. By the 1980s it had lost all meaning, becoming a cliché mouthed without conviction. Yet history has a way of circling back. Today, the “struggle for peace” has returned – and this time the stakes are even greater.

     Reagan and Gorbachev were unwitting midwives of the liberal order. Trump and Putin are its gravediggers.

    The resemblance lies only in timing: both moments represent turns of the historical spiral. The 1980s saw exhaustion on both sides. Now it is the United States, not Russia, that shows fatigue with a world order it once dominated. The demand for change comes above all from within America itself, just as it came from Soviet society in the 1980s.

    Peace through strength

     Trump’s ambition is to roll globalization back and replace it with what he sees as a stronger America – not isolationist, but a magnet pulling in advantage from all directions. To achieve that, he too needs a world order –

    Putin’s outlook is the mirror opposite. Where Trump sees America first, Putin sees the necessity of reshaping the global order itself – of ending the period of US dominance and forcing a multipolar settlement. To him, the issue of world order is not cosmetic but existential.

     

    The unipolar era is finished, even if its defenders in Brussels or Washington cannot yet admit it.